Perhaps you’ve heard or at least heard of the classic Jack Benny bit in which the comic entertainer who cultivated a notorious tightwad persona is held up at gunpoint. The robber makes clear he wants Benny’s wallet, and he wants it now.
“Your money or your life.”
There’s a pause.
The pause extends.
The pause simply will not end.
The robber grows exceedingly impatient.
“YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!”
Benny finally responds.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”
That was basically me as Aaron Nola [1] was rolling up strikeout after strikeout after strikeout after strikeout of the New York Mets in the opener of Friday’s doubledip (so named for Rob Manfred’s commissionership being twice as dippy as Bud Selig’s, which wasn’t thought possible). Nola was unstoppable. Not seemingly unstoppable, but unstoppable. The Mets couldn’t hit him. The Mets couldn’t lay a shred of wood on anything he threw, save for a few foul balls. The record for consecutive strikeouts, established by Tom Seaver [2] on April 22, 1970, was clearly on the endangered species list. With a bullet.
This was where I got to dealmaking, at least in my own head. Would I trade a guaranteed Mets loss in order to keep the strikeout record in the family? Your record or Tom’s record? Would I be OK with the Mets getting flattened by the Nola steamroller as long as we could mix in a popup or a groundout and keep this interloper from laying his hands on one of our most precious heirlooms, a priceless performance that we have been trusted to maintain under a collective Mets fan conservatorship for more than 51 years?
As Nola got up to 7…8…9 strikeouts, I was ready to sign for being no-hit as long as some intermittent fair contact was made. Never mind that the Mets had a hit (along with a hit by pitch) to open the affair before Nola commenced his de facto game of catch with J.T. Realmuto. It felt like a no-hitter. It felt like the wrong side of perfection. It felt hopeless.
In the bottom of the fourth, Michael Conforto came up as prospective consecutive strikeout victim No. 10, the Al Ferrara of the 21st century. Conforto’s job was simple. Don’t strike out, Michael. Can ya do that for me? Can ya do that for all of us? Can ya do that for Tom, who I’m pretty sure ya never met, but ya work at 41 Seaver Way and his number is on your sleeve?
No, Michael Conforto couldn’t do that. He struck out, just as he had in the bottom of the first, just as every batter in between his two at-bats had. With Conforto going down on strikes a second time, Aaron Nola had struck out ten batters in a row. Ten Met batters in a row. Aaron Nola had just tied Tom Seaver’s most sacred record.
My trade offer of an eventual Met loss for something other than another consecutive Met strikeout was no longer valid. Technically, it never was. Fans know that, but don’t acknowledge it in the moment of cosmic bargaining. All I could do was instinctively grit my teeth, grudgingly tip my cap, and cease concocting no-win deals.
A batter later, Pete Alonso put an end to the immediate sacrilege by doubling, halting Nola’s streak at 10 Ks, meaning that for the rest of time — or until later today when Jacob deGrom pitches — the consecutive strikeout record will be referred to as having been set by Tom Seaver in 1970 and tied by Aaron Nola in 2021. Or “the record belongs to Tom Seaver and Aaron Nola”. Or something like that. Shared. Not solely Seaver’s. Seaver and somebody. As if Tom has a peer.
I guess he does, for this, if little else. It’s better than “…broken by Aaron Nola on June 25, 2021.” Most records are meant to be broken. This one wasn’t meant to be touched, yet Nola’s philthy Phillie phingerprints are all over it. He earned it (with help from an egregious called strike three on Dom Smith, but that’s a rabbit hole whose plumbing will cast only more gray area on Great Moments in Mets history). To be disgustingly decent to Aaron Nola, he’s no bum. A man with an accent — Egyptian, I think — who worked at a local gas station would tell my parents that about my sister after she’d recently pulled in to fill up our other car. “Your daughter — she no bum!” It was apparently the highest of high-test compliments the fellas at the Exxon dispensed. That’s as high as I’m willing to go with Nola. He was part of the thrilling three-way Cy Young derby of 2018, the one where he and Jacob and Scherzer headed for the final turn neck and neck and neck until Jake pulled away in the home stretch. Jake still hasn’t looked back.
Until now, that’s what I thought of when I thought of Aaron Nola. Now I think about Tom Seaver, too. If deGrom and Seaver are your company, who am I to begrudge you your half of statistical immortality? To Nola’s credit, he did tell reporters it’s “pretty cool being in a category with Tom.” Indeed, though he should’ve referred to him as Mr. Seaver.
Mr. Seaver would likely not begrudge his new junior partner the accomplishment. On the other hand, I can hear the Franchise inserting the needle. Listen, big boy, in my day we went nine. Oh, and on my day with the ten straight strikeouts, I won the game. Also, let it be known, from the office of the conservatorship, Tom Seaver posted a 27-14 record against the Phillies lifetime…and that the Mets beat the Phillies in the 1966 drawing out of a hat for the services to one George Feaver [3].
On Aaron Nola’s day with the ten straight strikeouts, neither Nola nor the Phillies won the game. Not that game, specifically. As noted, there’d be another game of the “decibet” variety later. The decibet, in case you don’t remember the SNL sketch from Season One (in which case, citing Jack Benny may represent a generation too far to bridge), was the new metric alphabet, introduced to America by Dan Aykroyd as a smilingly efficient bureaucrat in 1976, the year the USA was briefly gripped by metric system fever. The hook was the standard alphabet of 26 letters was now too long and the government would be smushing it down to 10 — or as many San Diego Padres as Tom Seaver had struck out consecutively six years earlier.
LMNO will be condensed to single letters. Incidentally, a boon to those who always had trouble pronouncing LMNO correctly. And “open” would then be “LMNOpen,” as in, “Honey, would you LMNOpen the door?”
Our Manfred-mandated doubleheaders still have the first four innings, just as the decibet started with A, B, C and D, but by the fifth, you’re convinced you’re in the seventh, because my the seventh, you’re effectively in the ninth. Got that? Also, Wednesday is Sundae at Carvel.
The Mets and Phillies honored the legacy of Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton and other aces of yore by hardly scoring in Gamelet One. Nobody was throwing balls out of play and passing them to the MLB authenticator for Taijuan Walker [4], but Walker was magnificent for five innings (experientially seven, but the stats still say five). One run snuck across the plate on his watch, driven in by Nola, whose Bizarro deGrom act was quite unwelcome in Flushing.
Nola’s pitches eventually met Met bats, but they had no useful greetings to return. Joe Girardi removed the man who had just tied Tom Seaver and replaced him with Jose Alvarado with one out in the sixth. Somewhere Tom laughed. “Hey Gil, come look, you’re not gonna believe this.” Alvarado squirmed out of trouble in the sixth, but in the seventh, the first-place Mets lived up to their descriptor by taking advantage of a Phillie error — Luis Guillorme was involved; he always is — with a Francisco Lindor RBI single. This Lindor can play a little, we are learning.
The seventh, having been the spiritual equivalent of the ninth, meant we were going to the eighth, better understood as, in essence, the tenth, which comes with a runner on second no pitcher put there. In circumstances that render numerical labels useless, Seth Lugo [5] proved a strikeout machine in his own right, thus setting up the Mets’ own unearned runner, Lindor, to bring home the winning run following an intentional walk to Alonso and a single by Smith. Dom had convincingly threatened he would bunt, further phlummoxing thoroughly phlummoxable Phillie phielders. (If you don’t do the “ph” thing when Philadelphia’s in town, you’re just not living.)
With the Mets come-from-behind, demi-miraculous 2-1 win [6] in the opener, we felt as unstoppable as Nola. Nola had a swell no-decision for himself, though his team — like Carlton’s Cardinals in 1969 when Steve struck out 19 Mets — lost. Lugo had a win to go with his 3 Ks, just as Seaver did in ’70 when he took care of 19 Padres in all, 10 in a row to end the game. Tom’s records are Tom’s records, no matter who else has a piece of them. And our momentum was our momentum after a thrilling eight-/extra-inning win.
Then came the second game, which presented itself with the same general leitmotif. Like Citi Field lacks a moderately priced tier of seating between the aspirational seats and the upper deck — wherefore art thou, Mezzanine? — these decibet games continue to miss their middle innings. So once again, we had a pitcher’s duel developing, this time David Peterson [7] vs. Matt Moore, and it was as gripping as all get out until, in the sixth, a ball off the bat of Bryce Harper got out and it was 1-0. But wait! The Mets stitched together a nifty little rally off Philly’s bullpen and Philly’s gloves — Luis Guillorme was involved; he always is — and we had a tie and we had an eighth inning masquerading as a tenth. Sadly, we had Lindor and Guillorme not quite handling balls they usually absorb straight into their respective Roombas, and we were a run behind. And, sadder still, we didn’t get it back and had a 2-1 loss [8] to go with our 2-1 win, which indicates intuitively this pair of one-step-up/one-step back games didn’t really have to happen, and if they hadn’t, the consecutive strikeout record would still belong to Seaver and Seaver alone.
But it doesn’t. Hence, I grit my teeth, I tip my cap, and I take the split. There’s no other deal to be made.